Dashtoon needs to make anybody with a narrative to inform right into a comics artist, even when they will’t draw. It gives aspiring comics creator with a set of generative AI instruments, and a publishing platform that releases new episodes each day for impatient readers.
To seed the platform, referred to as Dashtoon Comedian Reader, Dashtoon commissioned about 30 comics and can begin including nearly 1,000 new episodes each month. It began monetizing in October and expects to make $15,000 in income through the first month, with plans to develop to $100,000 per 30 days over the following two to 3 months. The startup operates on a freemium mannequin that provides customers one free episode a day for every comedian.
The San Francisco and London-based startup introduced at present it has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Matrix Companions India and Stellaris Enterprise Companions with participation from angel traders.
Dashtoon was based in December 2022 by Sanidhya Narain, Lalith Gudipati and Soumyadeep Makherjee. Earlier than Dashtoon, Narain and Gudipati had been on the founding staff of Pocket FM, the place they labored on rising the India-based audio content material platform in the US. Mukherjee comes from a deep-tech background, together with Morphle Labs, which builds most cancers prognosis robotics.
Narain tells TechCrunch that the thought behind Dashtoon was planted whereas he and Gudipati had been working at Pocket FM. They did a advertising and marketing experiment, utilizing comedian strips to advertise Pocket FM’s serialized audio content material on platforms like Fb, and had been stunned at how nicely the campaigns did.
“We knew then that there was latent demand from U.S. customers to learn digital comics, so I made a decision to spend a while in Korea to grasp how the ecosystem works,” says Narain. “I spotted that comedian creation wants very excessive expertise and creating a creator ecosystem in a brand new geography would take loads of time and require an enormous funding.”
That modified when DALL-E 2 was launched, pushing text-to-image AI fashions ahead. Midjourney and Stability.AI additionally modified the world of AI-generated artwork. Narain and Gudipati determined that it was an excellent time to begin engaged on a platform that might create production-quality comics with AI. Mukherjee joined as CTO to construct Dashtoon’s AI Creation Suite, which the corporate says allows anybody to show their story concepts into digital comics. Then they will distribute and monetize them via Dashtoon Comedian Reader.
Dashtoon is focused at present author communities who need to flip their tales into comics, however don’t have expertise like sketching or lettering. To make use of Dashtoon Studio, a creator first uploads their storyboard. Then they choose characters for every panel from Dashtoon’s character library or add photographs and drawings to generate photographs. The startup’s founders say this reduces the time it takes to create an episode from 40 to 50 hours to simply 5 to six hours. This implies episodes will be revealed each day, rising Dashtoon’s probabilities of producing successful. Sooner or later, Dashtoon plans so as to add options enabling creators to generate storyboards and dialogues with AI, too, decreasing the time it takes to create an episode to below an hour.
Dashtoon founders Lalith Gudipati, Sanidhya Narain and Soumyadeep Mukherjee
Whereas Dashtoon Studio makes use of AI to generate storyboards and dialogues, that doesn’t imply there is no such thing as a creativity concerned, says Narain. “Think about generative AI as an agent that may do labor-intensive duties for you or current you with numerous choices, however the true inventive work should be achieved by people.” Content material creators nonetheless write tales and conceptualize characters, earlier than coaching them on Dashtoon Studio to allow them to be utilized in completely different poses and expressions.
Whereas generative AI is being built-in into extra inventive instruments, like Google’s Product Studio and Canva, many individuals, particularly artists, stay skeptical about AI artwork. Narain says the founding staff’s largest worry was that readers wouldn’t take pleasure in AI-generated content material, however the reception has been good up to now.
“Many of the AI merchandise are primary wrappers, and the content material they produce may be very mechanical in nature which implies the creator has very restricted management over the ultimate output,” he says, including that Dashtoon avoids that by giving creators full management over their closing product. He says that many comedian followers perceive that people can’t launch a brand new episode on daily basis, however there’s a shift in shopper conduct the place they do need each day releases (like binge-watching Netflix) and are okay with AI-generated content material so long as it’s pleasing.
One other criticism of AI-generated content material is that loads of it’s based mostly off stolen work from different artists. For instance, Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt were sued by artists who said the companies misused their copyrighted artwork. Narain says Dashtoon prevents copyright infringement with a number of measures. One is seeding is character library internally with its personal IP, together with digital artwork, hand drawn characters and photographs. Tales additionally should be the IP of its creator or Dashtoon, and the corporate might ultimately practice its personal basis fashions, partnering with knowledge suppliers who don’t break copyright regulation.
There are different digital comedian distribution platforms, together with Marvel Limitless and Webtoon. Narain says Dashtoon differentiates with its content material library and episode launch charge. It additionally needs to face aside by constructing a local creator group.
“The final decade within the content material trade was outlined by the disruption of content material distribution,” says Narain. “And the following decade shall be outlined by the disruption of content material creation.” He provides that Dashtoon presents an alternative choice to conventional, labor-intensive strategies of comics creation and distribution, which concerned writers both studying do artwork themselves or rent a 3rd get together after which promote on Amazon and different marketplaces.
Dashtoon will first concentrate on long-form content material in genres like romance, drama and fantasy. Then as extra creators onboard, it plans to broaden into different genres inside fiction, non-fiction and short-form illustrated content material. By way of creators, Dashtoon plans to first concentrate on working with revealed writers to transform their tales into digital comics and graphic novels for publication on Dashtoon Comedian Reader, earlier than constructing a group of creators that publish first on the platform.
In a press release in regards to the funding, Stellaris Enterprise Companions principal Naman Lohoty stated that content material consumption on cellphones has grown from a mean of 45 minutes per day in 2011 to 4 hours per day in 2021, due to new content material codecs like short-form movies, audio OTT, podcasts and informal video games. “Trying forward, we anticipate that webcomics will emerge as the following wave of development,” he added. “As pioneers on this area, Dashtoon is poised to guide the cost with the founder possessing an ideal mixture of content material, tech and world consumer acquisition expertise and expertise required to construct this enterprise.”